Most analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant...

Social security systems in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union devote most of their resources to earnings-related pensions and neglect"targeted"interventions to aid losers from the transition to a market economy. As social insurance systems, they have the characteristic weaknesses of the...

The author estimate the costs and benefits of labor retrenchment in state-owned industrial enterprises in China. Their results indicate the prevalence of low and stagnant labor productivity, low capital productivity, and excessively high wages in the state sector for the period reviewed...

Foreign direct investment brings host countries capital, productive facilities, and technology transfers as well as employment, new job skills, and management expertise. It is important to the Russian Federation, where incentives for competition are limited and incentives to becoming efficient...

It is naive to believe that a market economy can be introduced by"shock therapy,"the author argues. In the several cases when it has been attempted, it has brought problems. A market economy requires adequate institutions and appropriate behavior, both of which can be introduced only gradually...

One of the apparent inconsistencies in the breakup of multinational states is that, while the republics justified their decision by claiming they wanted increased sovereignty, the new states'strong desire to join the European Union shows their intention to dissipate this sovereignty. How can the...

Latvia's experience over the past decade shows that economic growth and real convergence can no longer be assumedto be exogenously driven processes determined by given technological improvements and relatively higher factor returns. Instead, it is an endogenously driven process led by many...

In 1980, China's government owned and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the government experimented with decentralizing state enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end, China's state enterprises had become more...

The authors investigate the theoretical effects of lobbying and pressure group activities on both economic efficiency and on equity. Looking at lobbying as a political activity that takes place alongside production, they find that lobbies may generate economic inefficiency as part of the process...

The authors construct a regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts. This enables the authors to provide theoretical predictions for the impact on the probability of renegotiation of a concession, regulatory institutions, institutional...